the little weaknesses of
philosophers, to turn his attention to the ideal systems of supposedly
"pure thought." He will find infinite satisfaction for his spleen in
the crafty manner in which "impure" thought--that is to say thought by
means of pictorial images--passes itself off as "pure" and conceals
its lapses.

Truth, as the complex vision clearly enough reveals to us, refuses to
be dealt with by "pure" thought. To deal with truth one has to use
"impure" thought, in other words thought that is dyed in the grain by
taste, instinct, intuition, imagination. And every philosopher who
attempts to round off his system by pure reason alone, and who
refuses to recognize that the only adequate organ of research is the
complex vision, is a philosopher who sooner or later will be caught
red-handed in the unphilosophic act of covering his tracks.

No philosopher is on safe ground, no philosopher can offer us a
massive organic concrete representation of reality who is shy of all
pictorial images. They are dangerous and treacherous things; but it
is better to be led astray by them than to avoid them altogether.

The mythological symbolism of antique thought was full of this
pictorial tendency and even now the shrewdest of modern thinkers
are compelled to use images drawn from antique mythology. Poetic
thought may go astray. But it can never negate itself into quite the
thin simulacrum of reality into which pure reason divorced from
poetic imagery is capable of fading.

After all, the most obstinate and irreducible of all pictorial
representations is the obvious one of the material universe with our
physical body as the centre of it. But even this is not complete. In
fact it is extremely far from complete, directly we think closely
about it. For not only does such a picture omit the real centre, that
indescribable "something" we call the "soul," it also loses itself in
unthinkable darkness when it considers any one of its own
unfathomable horizons.

It cannot be regarded as a very adequate picture when both the
centre of it and the circumference of it baffle thought. The
materialist or "objectivist" may be satisfied with such a result, but
it is a result which does not answer the question of philosophy, but
rather denies that any answer is possible. But though this obvious
objective spectacle of the universe, with our bodily self as a part of
it, cannot satisfy the demands of the complex vision, it is at least
certain that